hello all,
on saturday after work i expected pretty pissed to see in my open mailbox at home the same as the last couple days. nothing besides bills or some stuff about new pizza restaurants and stuff like this. suddenly some package fell right into my hand. as soon as i realised what it was, i started to dance and shoot with two revolvers in the air, like the carsalesman with the cowboyhat at the simpsons show.at least in my mind. so i jumped to the 3rd floor, taking about 8 steps at once and installed it (very intuitive and easy menu,good job devs). as soon as i created a pilot, murphy's law prooved to be true, because my girlfriend called me on my cell and had to tell me about 74 stories which lasted about 6 hours (subjective feeling). i didn't have a clou what she was talking about cause i stared all the time at the monitor, my pilot whispering to me all the time to get him in the air finally!:typing:,although i tried to listen. ok. so i want to share some of my new experiences.
first of all i tried the settings for mediocre systems (original cfs in full settings ran with about 60 fps) in quick flight, only to find out i had a fps between 9 and 20 (depending where i was looking with trackir), without any action somewhere at all beside rain. so i tweaked around with resolution, settings lowering step by step so i have right now in campaign about between 14 and 40 fps (although i am wondering why sometimes the same weather and activity runs faster, and sometimes slows down in a different mission in the same enviroment). after some trial and error i finally managed to delete the twist rudders, using only the saitek rudders. ok :woot:
the first mission (jasta 2 september 1916) we had to destroy a british sausage, so after getting airborne and circling around i warped near the action. everybody was there, but i noticed nobody tried to attack the ballon (i was the lowest rank in that flight,settings in fly by rank). searching myself for the ballon i lost the others, but after spotting it i tried to take it down alone by myself. don't know where the others were. so i destroyed the sausage and shortly after that feeling and hearing some hits with the message of some french name in a nieuport shooting at me. i looked around seeing nobody (damn, i love trackir), but then i saw a single nieuport below the clouds behind me hardly visible, so i turned around to begin the usual circling. being used to rb3d's ai i expected him to fly about and to dance before again trying to get to my six, but not here, not this time. everything i tried to shake him of was senseless, cause he seemed to be tied on a rope at my tail. finally i crashed and gone was my first career.
after i watched this new mission replay thing. on thing i noticed is though the french pilot had a name whilst shooting at me, in the replay it said only "nieuport blabla swiss cheese of your albatros blabla", so there was no name. one thing i do not like either is the stats overload. how fast was my bullet, and how far away was my plane while looking to the left related to the soldier sitting in a truck on a road at douai (just kidding, but everybody knows what i mean.)
all i can say is, the scenerie is really stunning (though beeing pretty lowend like it seems), the ai is brutal. the devs really created a hell of a game which i like to thank them for 10000000000 times. the little things like the wind you can feel in your stick and which is shaking your craft every now and then, the landscapes...could talk forever about the good things.
i tried a second campaign. i do not like to use warp often, only when in pressure of having only little time to fly. but in my second campaign i got airborne, looked where the others were, hit warp, got out of warp, dead because collidied with a mate. third campaign. same result. so right now i don't dare to use warp, especially if i have a pilot with a kind of carrer going. if anybody has a hint how to avoid it, please tell me.
the last mission i flew yesterday was to escort some rolands to bomb a target. so without using warp, i circled some time over my airfield and following the leader. then we met the two seaters, escorted them to the target and back. the mission said to patrol the area for 13 minutes, so i circled around with my mates at the roland drome for quite a time since my girlfriend arrived and i had to land there at their drome. does anybody know if the leader, after the assigned time is leading you back to your drome and everybody is landing? or is it similar to rb3d where they usually fly above till your gas tank is empty or crashing most of the times when trying to land?
one last question before finally ending my boring novel here. i know there are some threads about it, but i would like to upgrade my system and i am pretty much a nontechnical embryo amongst the others here.
i have a amd phenom(tm) quad core with 2.21 GHz, 3,5 GB ram and a nvidia 8600gt. as far as i would say, the videocard is the weakest spot in my rig, so i am considering to buy a better one which is compatible with the rest of the system so far, and which should rise my fps to beeing at constant 40s or higher and with higher settings. any ideas (i am sorry, i feel like a worm, asking an eagle what to buy to make him fly either, but i really don't have a clou about all this stuff). any suggestion would be appreciated.
@devs
thank you for the greatest game of all times IMHO, a game i dreamt about since playing wings on amiga for the first time. thank you.
creaghorn
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